In a conventional wood floor manufacturing line, boards processed by a tenoner are conveyed to manual sorting stations where operators form bundles, by arranging the boards in rows according to their grade. The floorboards to sort typically have a length in a range between 10 and 84 inches, in as many grades as determined by the producer according to the species.
Since bundles of floorboards are sold in units representing a surface (square foot), efforts are made to at least ensure a target surface in each bundle. However, since only the target surface is billed, it is important not to oversize the bundle. For that purpose, flexibility of the bundling system and method is needed.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,510,364 for example describes a method for selecting random length boards for nesting in a single row of predetermined lengths, including first arranging the boards on an accumulating rack, then conveying the boards to channels in an adjacent storage rack. As the boards are conveyed from the accumulating rack to the storage rack, their length is determined for transmission to a central processor. The processor calculates combinations of board lengths in the storage rack, which will form a single stock row having a combined board length within a predetermined target range. The processor then selects a preferred combination of boards from the possible combinations, and activates gates in the channels to drop the boards to a conveyor and move the selected boards to a stock row accumulating location. The processor then activates gates on the accumulating rack tracks to convey additional boards to empty channels in the storage rack, and repeats the process.
There is still in the art a need for an automatic floorboard classification method and a system therefor.